This tweet identified the real issue: People often talk about the risk of economic overheating, but that seems unlikely.  TIPS market participants seem to agree, as that market also forecasts close to 2% inflation going forward. The actual risk is that a very large fiscal stimulus package will not stimulate the economy (at the margin), as the Fed will offset the effect. (Just as the Fed offset fiscal austerity in 2013).  Instead, we will merely add to the national debt. Given low interest rates, there’s a respectable economic argument for a slightly higher steady-state budget deficit, and some of the fiscal package may be useful.  But quickly dumping $1.9 trillion into the the economy is almost certainly not a policy that minimizes the long run deadweight cost of taxes.  I’d encourage policy makers to take a deep breath and think about their long run objectives.  What are they actually trying to accomplish, and what’s the most cost effective way of getting there? And think at the margin. PS.  I began blogging on monetary offset back in 2009.  Expect to see a lot more discussion of this issue in the years ahead. (0 COMMENTS)

Paul Krugman has a new Substack, and his first post revisits the famous cycle of rising inflation and disinflation during the 1970s and 1980s, which led to a revolution in macroeconomic theory.  The subtitle is: Did we get the whole macro story wrong? I’m going to argue that the answer is “no”. The model that won out in the 1970s and 1980s was mostly developed by monetarists like Milton Friedman, who argued that the Phillips Curve was an unreliable policy tool and that expansionary demand-side policies would have only a temporary effect on unemployment.  Once expectations of inflation caught up to reality, unemployment would return to its natural rate. Krugman suggests that he initially accepted much of this thesis, but now has some doubts. In my view he’s focusing too much on the Keynesian interpretation of Friedman’s argument, which makes the data look more puzzling than it actually is. In Friedman’s Natural Rate model, unexpectedly high inflation causes low unemployment, and vice versa. The Keynesian version of the same model reversed the causation. Now it’s low unemployment (i.e. “economic overheating”) that causes high inflation. To give a sense of how this distinction matters, consider this comment by Krugman: The truth is that I’ve always been a bit uneasy about the standard story of inflation in the 1970s, even though it seemed to fit the prediction of clockwise spirals. My uneasiness came from the sense that the economy never seemed to run hot enough to explain such a big rise in inflation. I actually remember the 70s! And while there were years of good job markets, they never felt as good as the 60s, the late 90s, or 2019. But that’s not at all a problem for monetarist theory, as the monetarists always insisted that inflation was not caused by a hot economy, it was caused by rapid money supply growth. And monetarists also suggested that the effect would be quite transitory, with unemployment returning to its natural rate after a few years.  And finally, the natural rate was itself volatile, and could not be used as a guide to stabilization policy.  (To be fair, the preferred monetarist indicator, money supply growth, also eventually turned out to be faulty.) Rapid growth money pushed unemployment down below 4% in the late 1960s, as inflation soared.  This fits the monetarist model.  Then it rose back to its natural rate during the 1970s, rising above that rate during occasional periods of disinflation or adverse supply shocks.  This also fits the monetarist model. So Krugman’s right that the 1970s don’t fit the Keynesian interpretation of Friedman’s Natural Rate model (low unemployment cause high inflation), but the data does fit Friedman’s actual Natural Rate Hypothesis, if you assume rapid money growth and sprinkle in a few supply shocks.  The Keynesian model says high inflation should have delivered a booming 1970s, the monetarist version does not.  To the monetarists, the employment gains from stimulus were mostly exhausted by 1969. Much of the discussion is framed in terms of the slope of the “Phillips Curve”, which I view as an unhelpful construct.  People debate whether the Phillips Curve is flat or steep, which is like debating whether the price and quantity combination in the apple market is flat or steep.  It entirely depends on the nature of the shocks hitting the economy. If inflation fluctuates wildly between 0% and 12%, as it did from 1945 to 1982, and unemployment also fluctuates, then the Phillips curve will likely not be flat.  If a central bank successfully targets NGDP growth at a stable rate, then the Phillips Curve will likely slope the wrong way.  And if the central bank keeps inflation close to 2% (as they’ve mostly done since 1990), and unemployment moves around for reasons unrelated to inflation, then the Phillips Curve will be fairly flat. But the slope of the Phillips Curve is not a deep parameter of the economy; it’s an outcome that is contingent of the sorts of real and nominal (or supply and demand) shocks hitting the economy. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Krugman’s post is his discussion of some research by Jonathon Hazell, Juan Herreño, Emi Nakamura & Jón Steinsson (HHNS), which re-examines the Volcker disinflation: Now, the Friedman/Phelps story behind clockwise spirals did involve changing expectations: high unemployment was supposed to lead to lower actual inflation, which would over time be reflected in lower inflation expectations, which would feed through to further inflation declines. But the 80s decline is too fast to be explained that way, and seems to have started a bit before actual inflation came down. They [HHNS] suggest that there was a regime shift: When people realized that Volcker was really willing to put the economy through the wringer, they marked down their expectations of future inflation in a way that went beyond the mechanical link via unemployment. I think HHNS are correct, but not because Friedman was wrong.  As noted above, Krugman seems to assume that Friedman advocated the Keynesian interpretation of the Phillips Curve—unemployment causes low inflation.  Instead, Friedman argued that high unemployment is caused by lower than expected inflation. And both are ultimately caused by tight money. Nonetheless, the HHNS research does present one problem for Friedman’s monetarism—why did inflation expectations fall quickly with a decline in the actual rate of inflation?  Friedman used an adaptive expectations model, where a decline in actual inflation should lead to a decline in expected inflation with a substantial lag. Krugman then discusses other examples of where “regime changes” quickly broke the back of inflation, such as Spain after joining the euro. Fortunately, there is another model that can explain the HHNS findings—rational expectations.  When the public saw that Volcker was serious about reducing inflation, the expected rate of inflation fell faster than what one would predict using an adaptive expectation model. And this also explains why inflation fell faster than predicted by Keynesian models that focus on causation going from unemployment to disinflation.  Unfortunately, Krugman has already dismissed the usefulness of rational expectations models: Second, since the Friedman/Phelps prediction was based on trying to assess what rational price-setters would do, their apparent success gave a big boost to the notion that all economics should be based on maximizing behavior. Friedman always had too strong a reality sense to personally go down the rational-expectations rabbit hole that swallowed much of macroeconomics, but given the law of diminishing disciples it was bound to happen. Not surprisingly, Krugman fails to draw the conclusion that HHNS’s interpretation of the Volcker disinflation is a big win for rational expectations models. In fairness, the most extreme forms of Ratex models don’t fit the Volcker disinflation.  Some economists argued that inflation could be brought down costlessly if the policy of disinflation were fully credible.  I always doubted that view, due to sticky nominal wages.  Furthermore, in practice any disinflation will almost never be fully credible.  After all, Volcker first tried to bring inflation down in early 1980.  Then, after unemployment soared in the spring, Volcker reversed course and cut rates sharply (before the November election), and then made a renewed attempt to bring down inflation in the spring of 1981.   This time he persisted, but can you blame the public for being somewhat skeptical? Krugman is right that macro took a wrong turn in the 1980s, and is also correct that the conservative wing of the profession was especially prone to going down “rabbit holes”.  But the actual problem was not too much reliance on the rational expectations; it was too much reliance on “classical” models where labor and goods markets are assumed to be in equilibrium.  (Actual classical economists believed in sticky wage models.) To summarize, unemployment rose sharply during the Volcker disinflation, but if one uses a Keynesian model then the rise was not large enough to fully explain the Volcker disinflation.  Friedman’s adaptive expectations model of inflation also fell short.  Instead, the best model seems to be rational expectations combined with an assumption that the Volcker disinflation was partly anticipated and partly unanticipated—as if the public thought he had perhaps a 50% chance of successfully bringing inflation down before political pressures forced him to relent. To me, that seems like a triumph of Chicago school economics (before it went off course), not an unexplained phenomenon that cries out for a new explanation. PS.  I don’t like either the (old) monetarist or the Keynesian view of causation (P – > U or U – > P).  Instead, monetary policy causes NGDP growth, which causes trend inflation.  Variations in inflation are caused by either supply shocks (when NGDP growth is stable) or demand shocks (variations in NGDP growth.)  Unemployment fluctuations are mostly caused by unanticipated moves in NGDP growth, i.e. “monetary policy”, properly defined. HT: Tyler Cowen   (0 COMMENTS)

For the Independent Review, I’ve reviewed Locke Among the Radicals by Daniel Layman. It is a splendid book, which rediscovers “a coterie of nineteenth-century radical Lockeans with a penchant for anarchy and anti-capitalism”: Thomas Hodgskin (1797–1869), Lysander Spooner (1808–1887), John Bray (1809–1897) and Henry George (1839–1897). This is an unlikely lot, as these thinkers do not particularly resemble each other and are hardly considered in conjunction. But they are, in different ways, radicals who were strongly influenced by John Locke. Layman suggests that, in our usual understanding of the history of ideas, we tend to believe that Locke was unimportant in the 19th century and that he emerged again as an influence over political thinking in the second half of the 20th century. It is quite interesting that Locke became central again for liberal thinkers after WWII. Those who fueled this Lockean renaissance were not necessarily friends or advocates of liberalism, but scholars who, like Peter Laslett or C.B. Macpherson, contributed substantially in placing Locke again at the center of the history of liberalism. Then Robert Nozick came and the influence of Anarchy, State and Utopia made the sort of natural rights classical liberalism that Locke embodied again a matter of discussion for political philosophers, and not exclusively for those more versed in the history of ideas. I suppose it is relatively commonplace to say that Locke was not so important to understand 19th century liberalism; most such champions were Utilitarians. Layman looks for “Lockean influences” in the 19th century and finds them in radicals that foreshadowed developments that we can also acknowledge in the post-Nozick debate. The book thus aims at correcting the view of the irrelevance of Locke in the 19th century, and it does so persuasively. Layman’s treatment of Spooner’s work is particularly noteworthy. The review is critical of the conclusions of the book when it comes to the actuality of Locke. But I cannot recommend it highly enough and I’ve learned a lot from it. (0 COMMENTS)

Over at MoneyIllusion, I did a post discussing some odd election anomalies. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at the detailed election map more closely, certain consistent trends seem to show up. Let’s start with the basic overview. In 2016, Clinton beat Trump by 2.9 million in the popular vote. In 2020, Biden won by over 7 million votes. So obviously the country shifted substantially toward the Democrats. But many sub-groups went the other way: 1. Vietnamese-American areas in Orange County shifted dramatically toward Trump, by margins on the order of 40% 2. Working class Asian neighborhoods shifted strongly toward Trump. 3. Hispanic areas shifted strongly toward Trump. (But still Democratic.) 4. In Rockland County, New York, Orthodox Jewish areas shifted strongly toward Trump, with margins not usually seen outside Turkmenistan. 5. While data is sketchy, Amish areas in Pennsylvania seemed to shift substantially toward Trump. 6. African-American areas shifted mildly toward Trump (remaining strongly Democratic in absolute terms.) I’ve found news articles discussing most of these shifts, and in almost every case the article mentioned resentment against Covid shutdowns. So if all these groups shifted toward Trump, many quite strongly, how did Biden do so much better than Clinton? It wasn’t rural white voters.  That was a mixed bag, with no clear trend toward the Democrats. So where did the extra 4.1 million Democratic margin come from? The detailed election map of vote shifts from 2016 is clear. Look at almost any urban area and you see the same pattern. Red for Hispanic areas (sharp shift to Trump.) Pink for African American areas (mild shift to Trump.) And blue for white suburban areas, (strong shift to Biden.) All across America, white suburban areas shifted toward the Democrats. These were often well-educated white-collar workers who worked from home during Covid. Whereas working class minorities resented Covid restrictions, these voters resented the fact that Trump didn’t seem to make much effort to control Covid, discouraging testing, pushing unproven remedies, ridiculing mask wearers, etc. This might be the first election where the voters who did well under a president turned against him while those that suffered economically turned toward him. In this post, I’m not taking a stand as to which voters were right, just trying to understand why some parts of the country swung one way while others moved in the opposite direction. Here’s a map of the vote shift in Philadelphia area, which is typical. The bright red in the north side is Hispanic. The pink area just to the west is mostly black, and the further out areas are mostly white suburbs.  Again, these are vote shifts.  In absolute terms Trump still did fairly well among whites and poorly among minorities. PS.  You may wish to compare these vote patterns to the racial dot map of America, which is quite informative.  I’m sure people will do regression analyses, but these vote shifts are so obvious you don’t even need to run regressions. PPS.  I certainly don’t mean to suggest Covid was the only issue.  Various news articles suggest that communities such as Vietnamese-Americans and Orthodox Jews were also motivated by other issues. (2 COMMENTS)

President Reagan began regulatory reform with Executive Order 12291, titled simply “Federal Regulation”; President Clinton watered it down with EO 12866; and President Trump beefed it up with EO 13771 (“Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs”) and EO 13777 (“Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda.”) The executive orders required a cost/benefit analysis to assure that the costs of major regulations would be compared with their benefits. But on his first day in office, President Biden revoked those executive orders with his own memorandum titled “Modernizing Regulatory Review.” If you read the memorandum carefully, you’ll see that the word “modernizing” is inapt. Indeed, the memorandum would more accurately be labeled “Replacing Cost/Benefit Analysis with Rock, Paper, Scissors.” This is from David R. Henderson, “Open Season For New Regulations,” Defining Ideas, February 4, 2021. Another excerpt: But even if that weren’t a problem, there are two other major problems. First, notice that the OMB is being put in a position not so much to screen regulations as to propose them. Does this mean the agencies will quit proposing regulations and passively await direction from the OMB? No way. Indeed, the memorandum reads as if President Biden is proposing that OMB be a cheerleader for new regulation. He states that he wants OIRA to “play a more proactive role in partnering with agencies to explore, promote, and undertake regulatory initiatives that are likely to yield significant benefits.” Rah, rah, sis boom bah. The second major problem is one that anyone with much experience dealing with bureaucracy will probably notice: with so many possible criteria, regulators will have running room to implement regulations they like because those regulations pass some criteria even while they fail others. The regulators might, for example, choose a regulation that promotes public health and safety but at the expense of economic growth. Without cost/benefit analysis as a guide, how will they trade off between these two criteria? Any way they like. Note also the disappointment I express with Cass Sunstein’s take. He should know better. Read the whole thing.   (0 COMMENTS)

From my co-author‘s brother Greg Weiner: [I]n addition to being treacherous and menacing, the insurrectionists are also, strictly speaking, pathetic. These are grown men and women whose lives are apparently so devoid of other sources of meaning that their self-worth depends on who occupies the White House. No one should care about presidential elections so intimately or intensely. If single elections are sincerely perceived to threaten personal identity or civilizational survival, too much is at stake. There are lessons in these events for how Biden can help repair American political life. If the aspiration is, as leaders of all stripes have said, to “lower the temperature,” we do not need simply calmer politics or different politics. We need less politics. And: For all the anti-government rhetoric of the Trump movement, it subsisted on the illusion of relationships of personal caretaking between individuals and the president. The conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet explained totalitarianism in terms of this ardent affection for politicians. The human need for community remains when traditional social bonds collapse, he wrote, so people seek it in the superficial realm of the state instead. The last four years have upped the dose of politics so high that “less politics” is a reasonable prediction.  But I’ll still give “the same or more” 30%.  Fortunately, you can build a beautiful Bubble for yourself regardless of the political climate if you try.  So try. (0 COMMENTS)

One of the greatest discoveries of the 18th century did not come from physics or astronomy but from the nascent science of economics. It is the theory that if individuals independently and freely pursue their ordinary self-interest, the resulting social order will be efficient, that is, will allow virtually all these individuals—or at least their vast majority, given their starting points in life—to better satisfy their own preferences. Adam Smith is, among the first modern economists, the one who, in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations, best formulated the idea: The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations; though the effect of these obstructions is always more or less either to encroach upon its freedom, or to diminish its security. Most schools of economics, with notable exceptions (orthodox Marxian and Keynesian beliefs, for instance), have carried this idea to our days. The 18th-century idea of an autoregulating society was deeply revolutionary as it had been unknown all along the previous 500,000 years of mankind. It would make it possible to understand, during the following three centuries, the escape of ordinary people from hunger and poverty through the multiplication of real goods and services (GDP) in countries where political authorities stopped trying to control everything. Between 1775 and 2018, it is estimated that the British GDP per capita was multiplied by 13 (see the Maddison Project). Among many illustrations of the power of the idea of autoregulation, consider a story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: Leslie Scism, “Car Insurance Prices Fell in 2020 as Pandemic Reduced Driving.” Why did car insurance prices decrease by an average of 4% last year? Is it because the shareholders of property-casualty insurance companies started being altruistic? It would be a complex and unrealistic hypothesis to entertain. Nor would it be a credible hypothesis that altruistic governments across all American states forced the insurance companies to cut their prices. It is true that car insurance rates are monitored or controlled by many state governments (not everybody understands Adam Smith!) but only a minority of them require prior approval—which could probably not have worked so rapidly after Covid-19 hit in 2020. (See Marianne Bonner, “How Insurance Rates are Regulated,” December 14, 2028.) The explanation of the price reductions lies in the simple fact that that the several hundreds of car insurance companies in America are in competition and cannot avoid cutting their prices if only one of them does it to gain a competitive advantage. So if reduced driving pushes down automobile accidents and their cost during a pandemic, the price of insurance will automatically decrease. This is a general feature of free markets. Suppliers try to get the highest prices while buyers try to pay as little as possible. It would be vain to blame individuals in either group. On the contrary, it is because they act this way that prices are autoregulated towards the lowest possible prices for consumers consistent with suppliers’ costs. The drama is that many people still don’t understand the autoregulating character of free interindividual relations. A well-known story is that of the Russian official who, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, asked British economist Paul Seabright, “Who is in charge of the supply of bread to the population of London?” There are many examples of the persistent ignorance of the autoregulating character of free interindividual relations, and one does not need to look at poor countries laboring under tyranny to find them. Consider the vice mayor of Long Beach in California who defended the imposition of a $15 per hour minimum wage for grocery workers. Two grocery stores just announced they were closing: see Havley Munguia, “Long Beach’s Grocery-Worker Wage Bump Spurs Closure of Ralphs, Food 4 Less Sites in City,” Press-Telegram, February 1, 2021 (H/T: Andrea Mays). “Our job is to keep providing for the residents,” he declared, not realizing that providing for the resident grocery workers means not providing for the residents who eat food, as food prices will rise if only through shopping travel. More fundamentally, the vice mayor does not understand that the most efficient way to determine wages is to let the market do it. Another exquisite example is the postal inspector who opined on the conduct of a convenience store owner who sold Covid-19 supplies at a price the politicians and bureaucrats considered too high (see the Department of Justice’s press release): Unfortunately, Mr. Singh allegedly chose to use this opportunity to make money by hoarding and price gouging PPE [personal protection equipment]. The conduct charged in the complaint is reprehensible and against our most fundamental American values. Singh later entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and agreed to “donate” $450,000 of PPE, to be distributed by politicians and bureaucrats instead of being sold on the market to ordinary individuals who needed it urgently. If he thought he was in the “country of free enterprise,” he was obviously mistaken. There are quite probably exceptions to, and within, the theory that individual liberty generates an autoregulating social order—a “spontaneous order” as contemporary economists like F.A. Hayek call it. Justifications exist for governments acting under a realistic presumption of unanimous consent—for example around the goal of not settling conflicts by open violence and organizing protection against that or, more controversially, around other preferences for public goods. But to be credible, these justifications must be built up from an understanding of the general efficiency of the spontaneous order, not handed down from the millennial ideal of a shepherd or some political authority protecting his flock to better exploit it. A good question is why the 18th-century monumental discovery is still ignored by so many people. Public choice theory suggests many answers, which revolve around the idea that it is in some individuals’ interests to make sure it is ignored. Think of shareholders and executives of steel companies and the bosses of their trade unions. But there are also purely intellectual reasons: after all, many people—despite, or because of, public schools—still believe that the earth is flat. (0 COMMENTS)

The Power of Thinking on the Margin Because I understand the power of one vote–it’s very close to zero–I always vote in Presidential elections for the candidate who’s closest to my views. The first time I was able to vote in a Presidential election was in 1988 and from then until now I have voted for the Libertarian Party candidate. That’s where thinking on the margin has led me. But Presidential candidates have a much thicker margin. They make hundreds of decisions–about where to speak, how to debate, and what to say. When they are incumbents, they have a large input on many policy issues that can affect the outcome of the election. Health economist (and friend) John C. Goodman sent me an email Monday with the provocative title “Why Trump lost the Election: Health Care.” In it, he writes: The editors of the Wall Street Journal, the editor of National Review (Rich Lowry) and John Goodman all agree: Trump didn’t endorse the plan outlined by Goodman and Heritage Foundation scholar, Marie Fishpaw. Oops. Trump actually did the things Goodman and Fishpaw recommended, including allowing people to talk to their doctors by phone, email, and Skype; allowing employees to have access to 24/7 primary care as an alternative to the emergency room; and allowing employer-provided health insurance to be personal and portable. But Trump never talked about any of this. So, he didn’t get credit for any of it.   I think John is right. But one could also say that if he hadn’t been so incredibly rude and nasty in the first debate, he would have won also. (Although we now know in retrospect that Trump was probably awfully sick with COVID-19 during that first debate. When you’re sick, you tend to let out your inner self. And Trump’s inner self is nasty.) Consider the fact that if Trump had received just 43,000 more votes, properly distributed, in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, he would have won the electoral votes of those three states. That’s a total of 37 electoral votes. Had Trump won those, he would have had 269 to Biden’s, wait for it, 269. What would have happened then? It would have been thrown into the House of Representatives where each state delegation gets one vote. So California gets one vote and Rhode Island and Montana each get one vote. Etc. The vote is based on the November 2020 election results. Based on those results, Republicans had 26 votes. In that case, Trump would have won. Interestingly, though, he might have had Kamala Harris as his Veep because the vote for Veep would have been by U.S. Senators. This is unclear, though, because the Senate is tied 50-50. Does anyone who reads this know? Now back to the main point: Trump’s thick margin. As Holman Jenkins pointed out in an aptly titled Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “Trump Threw it Away,” January 6, 2020, Trump almost won. Jenkins wrote: Of course the microscopic margin rankles—he lost the pivotal electoral votes of Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin by fewer than 43,000 votes. He has every reason to be beside himself since he absurdly oversupplied these voters with reasons to vote against him and he still almost won. Imagine a team so bad and good at the same time that it would have prevailed if it had fumbled the ball 1% fewer times in its own endzone. Imagine what would have happened if Trump had been neutral, not nice but simply neutral, to the memory of John McCain. He probably would have won Arizona. (Of course, that’s like asking what would have happened if Trump hadn’t been Trump.) What if he had pointed out the record growth in median incomes for various minority groups? He might have won Georgia. What if had actually run a campaign based on his accomplishments up to the end of 2019? He might have won Wisconsin. Etc. So although we voters can’t individually affect the outcome, candidates can influence the outcome with a few key decisions. Here’s the longer John C. Goodman piece. (0 COMMENTS)

Reason magazine has a very good Nick Gillespie interview of former ACLU head Ira Glasser.  (The bolded question is Gillespie, the rest is Glasser): It wasn’t until my 30s that I began to understand free speech, that the real antagonist of speech is power. The only important question about a speech restriction is not who is being restricted but who gets to decide who is being restricted—if it’s going to be decided by Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Rudy Giuliani, [President Donald] Trump, or [Attorney General] William Barr, most social justice advocates are going to be on the short end of that decision. I used to say to black students in the ’90s who wanted to have speech codes on college campuses that if [such codes] had been in effect in the ’60s, Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver would have been their most frequent victim, not David Duke. Was that a convincing argument? It pulled people up short. They imagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against. I would tell them that speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting—especially politically—and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you. Back when I was at the University of Chicago, there was a great deal of controversy about the ACLU’s decision to defend the right of Nazis to protest in Skokie, Illinois (which had a large Jewish population.)  In 1977, there were many Holocaust survivors in Skokie, so the ACLU’s decision was understandably highly controversial.    Thus I was interested to discover that the strategy seems to have paid off: How did Skokie turn out? We won the case at every level. It even went up to the Supreme Court. It was an easy case legally because these bonding statutes had been struck down a million times before. Meanwhile, some of the people who lived in Skokie—once we won the case and the Nazis said they were coming—did what the town should’ve advised them to do in the first place: They organized a massive counter-demonstration. About 60,000 people were ready to come. And then the irony of ironies is, when confronted with that, Collin and the neo-Nazis never came to Skokie. Once we won that case, it also allowed them to demonstrate in Marquette Park, which was what they had wanted to do all along. They also confronted a massive counter-demonstration there that never would have happened without the case. It completely overwhelmed them; they couldn’t be seen or heard. Right after that they fell apart. One thing I’ve discovered in life is that bullies tend to be cowards. (0 COMMENTS)

You’ve got reactions to Orwell; I’ve got reactions to your reactions.  Here goes: robc: How close are your 5 steps to what Pinochet did in Chile? I think he at least followed steps 1 and 2. I was offering for steps for reforming a socialist dictatorship from within.  While Pinochet did step down and allow a return to democracy, the dictatorship he built was mild enough (and non-socialist enough) that he didn’t need a master plan to unravel it. Thomas DeMaio: I can’t help but to notice that the adherents of anti-racist ideology never seem to notice that structural racism, ongoing Jim Crow, etc. are taking place at the exact same time as an influx of immigrants who belong to the supposedly persecuted minority groups.  Is this a matter of not spontaneously noticing the contradiction or an example of Crimestop?  I’m thinking it’s the former. The obvious reply would be, “However bad things are in the U.S., they’re much worse at home,” or maybe, “There’s more racism in America than Mexico, but most Mexicans are happy to endure a little more racism if they can triple their material standard of living in the bargain.”  Though I’d also point out that non-white immigration to the U.S. is much more Hispanic and Asian than African, and that latter-day anti-racists have relatively little to say about racism against the former two groups. Weir: The counterpoint to both Marx and Orwell is Aldous Huxley: “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” Brave New World was first published in 1932.  So I’d say that Huxley was clearly wrong for the last four generations or so.  And the only notable sign that he was on to anything is the psychiatric drugging of school children, which governments use to sedate difficult children – not instill support for themselves.  I see no sign that governments are doing much to make people “love their servitude,” though there has been a notable increase in nagging alongside old-fashioned coercion.  Even there, incarceration massively outweighs flogging and kicking. Max Avar: Contingency cuts both ways, though. Had Beria, who briefly took power after the death of Stalin, managed to stay in charge—and he was certainly ruthless and experienced enough that he might well have—the Cold War and/or Soviet Union might have ended within a few years of 1953. I’d say it was amazing that Khrushchev managed to liberalize as much as he did.  I know Beria was allegedly open to a few compromises with the West, but I think he would have been much closer to Stalin than Khrushchev. John Alcorn: Re: Doublethink. Distinguish two scenarios: (a) Lucid insiders (The Party) deceive outsiders (the rest of society). I think Orwell underestimates this scenario. Orwell focusses on the psychology of the sender in propaganda. He narrowly — and, I think, mistakenly — asserts: “firmness of purpose […] goes with complete honesty.” Sometimes honesty and resoluteness are conjoined, but often not. Liars can be hellbent. Honest persons often keep their heads down. Plausible, but for your story to be right, the apparently self-righteously dogmatic ideologues I’ve encountered so many times would have to be Oscar-worthy actors.  That just doesn’t add up.  They’re not feigning self-righteous dogmatism; they’re the real McCoy. We should consider also the psychology of the addressee in propaganda. If addressees lack competence in lie-detection, then The Party doesn’t need doublethink. If, instead, addressees ‘know a lie when they see it,’ then Party members first must deceive themselves. This brings us to the doublethink scenario. (b) Party members doublethink. Orwell defines doublethink as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Compare the standard psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. When a belief (cognition) strongly conflicts with a desire (motivation), unconscious adaptation often occurs, like a person who turns in sleep and finds a comfortable position. This mechanism explains psychological adaptation to Party ‘rewrites’ more plausibly than doublethink does. The whole idea of cognitive dissonance is that people are strongly uncomfortable with holding contradictory beliefs.  I’d say that for most political activists, the discomfort is mild at most. Orwell notwithstanding, it’s difficult consciously to believe X and not-X (contradictory cognitions) at the same time. It’s much easier for the unconscious to adapt a belief to a desire (or vice versa). Perhaps, but most politically active people have little trouble adapting incompatible beliefs with each other. Wishful thinking (to believe X because one hopes X is true), counter-wishful thinking (to believe Y because one fears Y is true), and sour grapes (to believe Z is bad because Z is out of reach) are commonplace mechanisms in political psychology. You could classify doublethink as a species of wishful thinking – “I believe these seemingly contradictory beliefs are compatible because I hope they are compatible.”  But I think this rushes over a rich mental process that Orwell patiently explores. KevinDC: The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. I think Orwell overstates the importance of this. People seem to put very little stock in how well off they are compared to the past, or to people of other nations. Libertarians love writing essays pointing out how even very low income people in America today have access to things far beyond the imagination of even the wealthiest from a few decades back, and have standards of living in many key areas which are significantly better than a much higher income person in Europe. Yet, nobody who is low income ever reads these essays and comes away feeling reassured. They care far more about how well off they are relative to their peers. It simply doesn’t matter to them that Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan would have envied their access to GPS devices and air conditioning and Novocain or that they have more living space than an upper income person in Belgium, when almost everyone around them has those things too. Brilliant words, Kevin.  This is my favorite reaction in the entire Book Club. An alternate strategy of the Party would be to simply ensure that everyone is equally immiserated. Since people seem to care far more about their relative well being compared to their neighbors, rather than their absolute well being, or relative well being compared to the past or people in distant countries, the proles might have been kept relatively content in their condition. Since the whole society is kept poor, there would be none of the envy and resentment we are so often told is destabilizing for a society. Given the massive size of Oceania, I fully agree.  If Luxembourg were vastly poorer than its neighbors, the stability of Luxembourg’s government would be endangered.  But when your country is so large that you rarely remember the existence of other countries, your rulers can rest easy. Reminder: Next week, we start with “War Is Peace”! (0 COMMENTS)